“Open skies painted above painted doorways and painted birds skimming across bricks trying to fly away. Little bird, what are you thinking? You come from a can.”

“Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for”

“Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird”

“It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere.Red. Red. Red.Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches.Red means run.”

“You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.”

“No bird in a cage has ever come to know what the mountain winds feel like, by staring at the free flying birds, wishing that they would fall from the sky!”